Shudder Before the Beautiful
by VulkansNodosaurus
Summary: The Four, before. Lyrics from Nightwish.
1. Awake, Oceanborn

A/N: I live! This is just a four-shot I felt the need to write, and got down in one afternoon; deepest apologies for any errors. The stylistic experimentation is 100% a one-time thing. I do not own the F4, though if I had that privilege I'd actually publish a comic starring them.

* * *

Reed Richards' first memory is struggling to read a comic book about Newtonian mechanics, and his father doing his best to explain. It's a frustrating experience, but he likes the book because it's pretty, and because it's important, being (he believes then) what his parents do when he's not around.

Reed can read better than he can talk, at the time, and for that matter afterwards. He's not autistic – Nathaniel and Evelyn made every effort to ensure they knew every detail of his psychology, and he gets those details after – but he's hyperlexic, and even better with numbers. A genius, the adults around the apartment call him, and Nathaniel later tells him that those words cause him to panic, because so few child prodigies ever fulfill their potential, and if there's anything Nathaniel needed as a parent, it's that Reed fulfilled his potential.

* * *

Reed's an only child, and not one with a particular fondness for the outdoors, though he's curious enough when he's forced to go out on a walk through Palo Alto. So he makes his first real contact with other kids in kindergarten, and for the most part he's entirely unimpressed, because many of them don't even know how to _read_.

In first grade he continues to be somewhat distant, though after a discussion with his parents he tries to help some kids with their math, even though it's trivial, and he can't wait to enter the gifted and talented program next year. Many of them don't even care, so he breathes a sigh of first-grader frustration of the unfairness of the world when he sits down with a recent transfer.

"I'm Reed," he says. "What do you want?"

The kid shrugs. "To be an astronaut."

"I mean with the _math_ , stupid."

"My name's Ben Grimm. Jerk."

Reed looks at Ben and makes his best Smaug impression, and then Ben looks back and tries to copy Reed, until they both start laughing.

Somehow, it's the start of a best friendship.

* * *

The G&T program is not all it's cracked up to be, and Reed is a bit disappointed that Ben gets in – Ben's a hard worker, of course, and not actually stupid, but he's not _that_ smart. He's even more disappointed that Ben is the second-best in the program.

He continues studying with his parents instead, switching between going way too fast and backtracking, as they try to understand precisely how much Reed is capable of. The answer, as always, is proportional to his interest, but what that's proportional to is less clear. Ben joins him for any of the talks related to space, and they also talk on the phone, long discussion of the cosmos and of science fiction, of heroism physical and scientific.

It's in the May of second grade that it happens – Evelyn Richards is rushed to the hospital for terminal cancer, caused by something of what she's studying with Nathaniel, which is a possible fifth fundamental force or something like that, which Reed doesn't care about, right now, but somehow Nathaniel still does, and develops a method of shielding by throwing himself into his work for a month. That means that Reed's almost alone for that month, and though Nathaniel's cancer-free, he still feels like he lost both parents; but Nathaniel's working to prevent anyone else from dying, and so Reed decides through the tears that he'll try and do the same, no matter how hard it is, and Ben swears an oath to help, in any way it takes, and holds Reed up during the funeral, because they're going to be heroes, and that's what heroes do.

* * *

In middle school (private, of course), Reed tries various academic competitions before settling on Baxter Science Championships and NMP, and Ben joins him in the former. They work on rocketry together for it, and then they practice more real rockets, moving further and further east as their constructions become, increasingly, questionably legal. Not immoral – Reed knows there's no actual danger, and Nathaniel guides them towards minimal illegality, because he's back, Nathaniel Richards, educating his son again, but he has to understand the riddle his wife died for, no matter what, too, and so Reed has half a father, but that's enough, really.

But school also means PE, and somehow even though the school is good there's a bunch of people there who are stupid, but strong, and one day in the locker room Reed sees one of them attack him; he fights back, but the bully is only made angrier, and lifts his foot to kick Reed –

And then Ben's there, and pulls the kid off, and kicks _him_ in the face, and it's senseless brutality that Reed knows he'll have to talk to Ben about later, but for now it's enough, and he's earned some respect for fighting back at least, so it doesn't happen again.

"I joined the football team," Ben says later.

"Please tell me you mean soccer," Reed says, but Ben doesn't, even though he knows, or should know, that American football will break his mind, that it'll lead to irreversible loss of intelligence from the beginning, but Ben doesn't listen, he doesn't listen.

(Ben's father was a star quarterback in high school, and Ben has the potential to do the same; and so he won't allow Ben to quit, and Ben doesn't particularly want to.)

* * *

Reed watches Ben's bar mitzvah, but afterwards they go to different high schools, and Reed is finally being challenged, if only in competitions; and people are talking, already, about him being as smart as his father, and so he focuses on what matters and puts Ben behind him. He was a friend, Reed thinks, but he had stupid parents and refused to resist them, and maybe it wasn't his fault, but it's still what it is.

Reed applies to a bunch of colleges, but he knows well that he has his pick both for academics and for price, because his father had time to get moderately rich off inventions; and so he decides on State University in New York, because it's where his father went and he's not sure what he wants except to be his father, and it's one of the top five colleges in the country, too, so that helps. He agrees to call his father once a week, and Nathaniel is sad but satisfied when he leaves; and it's only after he gets to State that he finds out that Ben went to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and so he doesn't have the chance to spit on a picture of Ben for selling out to death.

* * *

Reed makes new friends, ones that are actually on his level, and excels in his classes while doing physics research. Victor von Doom from Latveria is the most brilliant physics mind at the school (though a bunch of neutrals seem to think it's Reed, which is wrong, they just think that based on his parentage he's sure), and while he's also crazy and believes in magic, and is as arrogant as Reed was in his first grade, he still strikes up a friendship with Reed, and Reed sighs at Victor's description of Latveria's oligarchs but if anyone can save the country it's going to be Victor.

But Victor begins to develop a plan to save his mother's soul from Hell, and Reed knows it's madness, and the calculations show that it's going to explode and take out half the dorm – so Victor moves to a basement lab to assuage Reed, but does the experiment anyway and it explodes, and even if it's with less force than Reed calculated Victor's still in the hospital for weeks, and expelled, and as Reed sits in the deans' office and talks about Victor's crazy ideas he's crying. Not because of Victor, but because of the article in the paper he's reading, the one from yesterday, the one about Nobel winner Nathaniel Richards dying in a mysterious lab accident, no body recovered, died a hero saving his assistant from the fifth fundamental force that Reed now understands better than anyone else in the world.

The next day, Reed changes his major to aerospace, because he can't do what his father did. Not anymore.


	2. Tales from the Seas

When Susan Storm gets accepted to Stark-Buckman her father's happy, moderately, but only for a few moments, before he remembers that she applied to the Computer Science program. "Business is the only major," he always says, absurd though that is, and Johnny is unhappy enough about that, but Sue doesn't want a major about nothing except how to talk to people, and she is actually good at programming. She talks about the Singularity to him then, about the possibility of creating superintelligences to obsolete modern capitalism, and he responds by disowning her, except for paying for her education. The company would go to Johnny, he says.

She wants to high-five Johnny after that, though he's less than ecstatic about the affair. "Don't worry," she replies. "You're going to do fine, and you can always pick a non-business major to piss Dad off terminally."

Johnny doesn't particularly like that option either.

* * *

SB goes well enough, and her father calms down enough after Johnny goes to Pacific in business that he's ready to forgive her if she goes ahead and starts a Silicon Valley start-up; but of course she doesn't want Franklin Storm to forgive her, or at least not much, and she doesn't want to create calendar apps or smartphone security or anything like that, and so she applies to a Ph.D. program at CalSci, and by that point Franklin Storm just sighs, because she has enough in fellowships to not need him.

"You've got good money sense," he tells her over the phone. "If your common sense was even a tenth as good…."

* * *

CalSci's tiny, and for the most part its computer science department is theoretical-only, and so she delves deep into conceptual material, but she does have a practical mind, for all that she tries to change that, and so she studies robotic flight, and talks to the aerospace faculty about that; and there she meets Reed Richards.

Reed's a third-year grad student, but the son of Nathaniel Richards, and so she feels a certain kinship with him in that alone, and they do tend to like the same sort of sci-fi as well, and Reed's evangelism of nuclear everything except weapons is bizarre but cute, and they hit it off in some ambling fashion.

She kisses him in the lab, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory north of campus where they're both interning, and Reed's confused and she doesn't immediately realize it's Reed's first kiss, because Reed's straight and not that awkward and seemingly a good person; but she realizes later that Reed's also kind of oblivious to stuff outside of science and futurism, in the vein of the scientist ideal she aspired to but was dragged down from by her upbringing.

Her father's opinion is that Reed's at least rich – and he is, after his father's death, though he doesn't seem to be aware of it.

* * *

It's in Reed's fifth and last year – really he could have defended his thesis in three if he didn't spend time doing everything but aerospace on the side, and if the professors were more amenable to his nuclear obsession – and Sue's third and penultimate that she asks him about his plans after graduation, and he isn't that sure, besides a vague 'academia' that feels more like a pre-planned path than a dream (even if he has dreams, and many of them he could achieve as a professor, and it's not like he doesn't have a plan at all, it's just that he hasn't considered alternatives). She talks about industry and Reed doesn't mind, and he has the capital, and they could try to follow in Elon Musk's footsteps and go to the Moon –

Reed doesn't seem opposed to that, exactly, but he doesn't know the first thing about running a business, even if he's good at money management, and she doesn't want to; and so she calls Johnny, who's by now CEO of a subsidiary that's basically enough of Storm Inc. to do space, and manages to hash out a crazy plan that would never work as a pitch to investors but is enough to fan her brother' dormant awesome insanity, which of course they don't tell Franklin Storm yet, if only so that they can see the look on his face when they do, together. Johnny isn't too fond of her dating a rich engineer, despite being a far richer engineer himself, but he grudgingly hires Reed nevertheless, in a manner that doesn't look like nepotism due to Johnny's obvious hostility, which Reed takes with an impassive shrug and a desire to get to work.

* * *

Reed's plan is for a nuclear-powered rocket, or rather for several nuclear-powered rockets, which he leads the design of. Johnny is less than excited about the PR of that, but he does relish a challenge. After Sue's defense, Johnny hires her back on, and prepares the press conference announcement.

As predicted, Franklin Storm's reaction is maddened, and he almost cuts funding to Johnny – but Johnny knows enough people to convince them that the plan would turn a profit, even though it obviously won't, and with a groan Franklin keeps Johnny as his technical heir, while trying to contain their plans.

She stays together with Reed, and slowly convinces him to leave behind his losses, convinces him that she won't fade like everyone else he's ever known, agrees to his crusade against death. Reed picks up his father's abandoned work on the side, manages to pinpoint anomalies in this 'cosmic force' that Sue doesn't understand the importance or function of. Reed finds a fluctuating anomaly in Tsiolkovskiy Crater on the far side of the Moon, a proposed landing site for Apollo 17, and after that he joins the astronaut training, and convinces Sue to, even though she's still unsure at best about going to Tsiolkovskiy given the history of the cosmic force.

"Don't worry," he says. "It's not going to be safe, but nothing in life is." Which is a conclusively false understanding of statistics, even if it is a nice sentiment.

* * *

Hiring pilots is a challenge, made harder by general anti-nuclear sentiment. Investors can give money to questionable ventures without hesitation, but it's a lot harder to convince anyone to give their life, or rather risk it.

The first launch has Johnny himself as the official pilot, though really Sue's autopilot takes care of most everything, and as she stands some distance away from the tower of fuel Sue feels extraordinarily worried about both her increasingly fearless brother (no, that was not a good thing, fear kept people alive, and even Reed had a healthy amount of fear even if its targets were strange) and their situation if this failed. When the countdown ends and the rocket begins to lift off, she worries that it's too slow, that there's no way the launch would work, that Reed must have made a mistake –

But the launch works, and she embraces her brother again at the end of it, and even though he emphatically refuses to be the main pilot for the moonshot, she knows that they'll see an infinity they feared to never meet.


	3. The Unknown

Ben Grimm's efficiency as a fighter pilot is not based on his number of aerial kills – none – but in his ability to disable a plane, drone, or other enemy for others to finish off, and to keep the rest of his squadron alive and unharmed. They're known as the Immortals, have been since long before Grimm, and they are fire-forged friends in the most classic sense.

They are adults, though, technically, even if they don't usually act like it; and when, in time they come back to the States, to Fort Hood, there is talk of leaving the force, especially since there's plenty of discussion about drones taking over basically all pilot duties. Ben knows it isn't right to try and convince them to stay, that if they don't get another tour this is pointless anyway, and he doesn't really care about climbing the ranks and perhaps he could still be an astronaut, even if NASA is being funded less and less, or a test pilot or some such. But he still doesn't want to leave, and so he stays, wondering where next and knowing, full well, that he can hardly conceive of a life after the military, and that Reed had been right about American football, that his IQ had surely fallen ten points since childhood, at least, even if the tests say it hasn't.

* * *

The thirtieth of May doesn't seem special in any way until the bombs start falling, and it's only later that Ben realizes the date is the twentieth anniversary of Evelyn Richards's death.

Ben's mind immediately jumps to a Chinese invasion of some sort, but he is near enough an Apache that he starts the engines before thinking about any of that. Rob takes gunner, and they take off, dodging an uncomfortable amount of fire.

In the sky, there aren't any Chinese or Russian planes – just three American drones, bombing the shit out of Fort Hood.

Ben and Rob move in, and manage to down two, the third being brought down by the AAs; it's just a combat mission, in those moments, easy enough to deal with. It's afterwards, as the IT folks mess around with the smoking remnants of the hacked (or possibly just buggy) drones, that Ben walks through the base, looks at his crewmates' bodies – whether dead or merely broken – that he also looks at himself, and his mind flashes back to seeing Arabs lying, just like that, in the ruins of military compounds or apartment buildings or hospitals, and – and he knows, then and there, that he couldn't, he can't kill anymore, or at least not like this.

* * *

He gets a medal and an honorable discharge, and the PTSD doesn't really develop per se – his psyche is tough, mostly. But he thinks about that promise he made Reed, so long ago, about fighting for life, being a hero, and if he joined the Air Force to become a hero he's no longer sure that he fulfilled that.

Which is why, when Reed calls him, he doesn't even think of refusing. He's practiced spaceflight on the simulators, after all, and Reed represents the bright childhood he left behind, including those days as a star quarterback in high school, even though Reed warned against that, and it's right, somehow, to risk one's life for science, even if it's not a well-calculated risk. He thinks of those phone conversations in elementary school, and smiles, and promises to do anything he can, because those rockets in middle school never exploded and they won't now, and if they're nuclear it doesn't matter, that after all it wasn't nuclear bombs that killed half of the Immortals in Fort Hood.

* * *

Ben takes an immediate dislike to Sue Storm, and not only because she dreams of an AI superintelligence and Ben hates nothing more than AI, so he does nothing more than congratulate Reed on a good-looking girlfriend; but he strikes up a surprising friendship with Johnny Storm, despite him being where he is because he was born rich (and not even particularly _smart_ like Reed), because Johnny is a great pilot for a civilian and also just a great guy in general.

And Reed, well, Reed is sadder, more serious, more manic, and has regained some of the arrogance Ben tried to get him away from, but in the end he hasn't changed much, hasn't degenerated like Ben had; and so Ben works twice as hard as he used to, smokes less, and generally gets himself into a position where he can say that he is still the same person he was, even if a bit less of him. His parents call him and tell him that he's going to get himself killed, and he responds that they never said that about the Air Force, and that Reed's engineering he trusts with his life.

His crew for the moonshot will be Reed, Sue, and Johnny, which he considers a ridiculous setup, at least in terms of Sue, because though Johnny can be a backup pilot fine, and Reed knows more about the ship than anyone and is also there for the science with respect to the anomaly (risking both of them is still absurd, even without Sue), Sue's position is apparently software troubleshooting, but of course she's in there from nepotism, and while Ben has to admire Reed for getting his girlfriend to the moon, it's really a clear mistake.

* * *

Ben's first flight is with Harold Dry, one of the engineers, and is just a LEO tour; but when the countdown begins his heart's still hammering. The engines fire, and the stages separate one by one, and soon enough Ben is looking at the continents pass by from orbit.

Day turns to night as the ship circles Earth, and Ben sees lights in the night, all across the countries of the world; and he cries a little, and Harold thinks it's the view, but really it's the thought of death, and suffering, and how little a difference a human can make, and how he has nevertheless thus far made a negative difference. There's no borders on the globe, though sometimes they can be traced out by density of lights; but there's nothing special about America, from this height. And sure, the people they were killing were bastards, the lights they were smashing were ones that were themselves bad for the world, and maybe if he'd acted like he was cauterizing a wound it would have been different, but he didn't care, he may not have found glee in death but he did feel professional satisfaction, and here with the void all around him that seemed so pointless, because they were all people, and this infinity all around didn't have any more of them in any direction but down.


	4. We the Voyagers

The moonshot plan is simple – a single giant rocket, dubbed the _Fantastic_ , landing on the moon upright and then taking back off to Earth. Johnny Storm manages to maneuver himself into being on the crew, and gets outmaneuvered into bringing Sue along as well, and gets a solid talking-to from his father about it.

"There's a reason Apollo 11 didn't have the President on it!" he exclaimed. "Or the chief engineer, for that matter."

"They couldn't pass the physicals," Johnny replied. "Meanwhile we're all thirty or so, and physical demands are lesser now anyhow."

Franklin Storm growled. "I _tried_ to keep you safe! Instead you've put both of yourselves onto that damned nuclear rocket, and then plotted a course to that thrice-damned crater with the stuff that killed Nathaniel Richards, and when it all blows up –"

Johnny has a number of retorts, but lets his father rant, because being needlessly contrary is his sister's thing.

* * *

The launch goes well, but Johnny had never considered just how _boring_ three days in space would be.

He's not one for boredom, usually. He's always been able to find matters to occupy himself with, which is how he managed to be decent at a million different things. But here it's a small ship with only four denizens, and there are no games on the onboard computer, and while Reed and Sue spend their free time on a card game they brought along, it takes eight hours to play one match, and Johnny isn't _that_ bored.

So he talks to Ben, talks about regrets and missteps. Johnny is pretty sure he doesn't really have any major ones, though he should probably have introduced more variety in his girlfriend rotation, so that it wouldn't be discovered, but Ben is a war hero and now a pilot for a Moon mission, and still dwells halfway in the past, almost like Reed but less unconsciously whiny. And Johnny increasingly dislikes Reed for putting Ben in this situation; Ben's loyal to his childhood friend, and Reed likes him and all, but it doesn't seem at all like a healthy friendship (of course, Reed's broken in his own ways, but Johnny can't imagine that someone truly hung up on his parents' deaths in research accidents would bring himself and his girlfriend on a mission to the same physical phenomenon, even if Reed swears they'll be at a safe distance). Well, Johnny's not a therapist, but he thinks Ben's less semi-depressed after they talk, and you can't ask for much more.

* * *

Ben takes over piloting duties for the landing, and manages masterfully, though they land rather closer to the blue glow than Johnny'd like.

"The anomaly's in the center of the blue storm," Reed explains. "The blue covers a much bigger area, but its outer fringes should be safe." He brought instrumentation for measurements, though, and those will need to be placed within the glow.

The hatch opens and Johnny steps out, as planned, Ben following after.

"So we return," Johnny pronounces solemnly, "to the first step of infinity's stairway; and this time we will not stop on it."

He plants a flag – not an American one, this time, though the crew is entirely American, but the flag of the United Nations, claiming the far side of the Moon for Earth. Storm Inc. will mine the area later, he knows, even if Helium-3 is not economically favorable to import yet, and explore the blue area that seems to oscillate in size in more detail. For now, they're there for rocks and to place sensors for things Ben doesn't understand.

Then Johnny looks back, and sees Susan exit the ship with a wide grin on her face and – is that the outline of a ring?

* * *

Johnny has to accept, grudgingly, that proposing on the Moon is impressive, even if it continues Reed's self-aggrandizing trend. Well, he accepts that Sue is also incredibly near-sighted, in the metaphorical sense, at times, so maybe it'll turn out fine.

Ben, who had of course known all along, is placing the instrumentation – they'd decided to place it outside the glow after all. The Richards Force, as the problem Nathaniel and Evelyn Richards had died for is increasingly being called to Reed's chagrin, is unpredictable in the extreme. Indeed, as Johnny stares into the wavering blue depths, he seems to see something coming towards….

He has time to call out, on the radio, before it hits them. But nothing else.

* * *

The blue storm isn't actually particularly uncomfortable, and it recedes again after ten minutes. Sue posits that it's sentient, though a shaken Reed doesn't believe so, and Johnny can't think about any of it because he knows, he knows he's dead, he knows his father was right all along, and worst of all he knows he doomed Sue as well, by going along with their crazy moonshot plans. Reed can't detect any distinct features of the blue glow that might cause it to be dangerous, but then that means he has no idea why it appeared either.

They still appear strong, as they take off, with the time a bit earlier than planned, and Ben will have some work to do on the Earth landing, but he assures Johnny it's nothing he can't manage. And Johnny nods, and thinks about why in hell they picked this landing site, and whether his parents' experimentation led to some unnatural fixation on the issue for Reed, because there's no way that Reed's decision-making process is normal.

* * *

Reed assures them all that it can't be cancer or radiation sickness, or anything else caused by something other than the cosmic force; and Nathaniel Richards' body vanished, so it isn't that either. And that's comforting only until they wake up around the midpoint of the flight, feeling internally sick, and realize they can't find Sue.

They still hear her voice, they soon understand, but she seems to flicker in and out of visibility, and Ben is bulging, and Reed looks like he's melting, and Johnny feels very cold but outside of that he's the closest to normal of the lot, so he inputs commands into the computer when necessary, but he can't land, he knows, not with his head feeling as it does, and with the hallucinations of Sue vanishing and Reed dissolving and Ben turning into a statue.

He wonders if this is all a dream, hopes it, that his body hasn't betrayed him as it seems to have; but inside he knows this is real. He's certainly fevered, and probably hallucinating, but he wakes up Ben before the end, who by this time looks like a giant monster to Johnny's near-blind eyes, and as he collapses whispers a promise.

"We will return," he mutters to the void and to a stoic Ben Grimm. "We will return, and we will not be defeated."

* * *

He wakes up from the g-force on the descent. The _Fantastic_ is dark, and Ben is clearly struggling, the controls not suited for his bulging hands.

Ben does it anyhow, places the _Fantastic_ onto a field in North Dakota. Like the first Russian cosmonauts, Johnny thinks, in the Central Asian steppes, as the hatch opens, and Ben climbs out, Johnny after him.

It's near noon, in the prarie spring. The sun is bright in the sky, melting a few last snowpatches in the grass. And Ben Grimm is silhouetted against it, a giant rock monster that still has the face of – of Johnny's friend. And Johnny feels triumphant despite it all, at he looks at the sun, and hot, and on fire.

He lifts into the air, watching his body burn without being burned, as Sue leaves the ship, flickering in and out of visibility, and Reed, his body now stretching in controlled fashion, climbs out last. From tens of meters up, he looks at the three of them, alive, transformed but emphatically alive, and he feels good. They're not just temporarily stable – he _knows_ , their current condition is one that will not kill them, knows it intuitively, though Reed will run tests to confirm it.

He leaves a flaming trail in the sky as he sets down, and looks at his sister and his friends.

"Well?" he asks with a wider grin than he has before attempted. "What now?"


End file.
